Miart Milan 2023

For the 2023 edition of Miart, the Antonio Verolino Gallery in Modena presents a stand, curated by Carlo Sala, focused on the historic exhibition Explorations on the Via Emilia put into dialogue with a contemporary author. The exhibition which took place in Reggio Emilia in 1986 is, together with Viaggio in Italia (1984) – of which it is ideally the second act – one of the most significant moments of Italian photography of the second half of the twentieth century capable of marking a new way of relating towards a contemporary landscape in profound mutation, which is hybridizing and of which it is necessary to grasp even those minor and everyday aspects that are closely linked to human life.
The stand at the fair will revolve around a table-shaped exhibition display where the almost complete corpus of vintage photographs of the exhibition will be displayed, coming from the heirs of one of the curators of the project, with works by, among others, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Vincenzo Castella, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Vittore Fossati Guido Guidi and Mimmo Jodice. A wall will be dedicated to Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano 1943 – Roncocesi, 1992), photographer and creator of the exhibition, with a selection of vintage works focused precisely on his relationship of continuous rereading of the territory, of the inhabitants and of the Emilian community, where they pose a whole series of reflections on the imagination and perception of places. Closing the project is the intervention of the emerging artist Jacopo Valentini (Modena, 1990) who, thirty-five years later, has created an ideal dialogue with historical works by creating the Paesaggi da table series. The author wanted to reflect on the identity of those specific territories through still life images taken in a series of restaurants that cross, among others, the provinces of Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Bologna, Forlì and Cesena. The photographs are overlying views of elements which in their visual details show a cultural stratification, capable of rendering today’s image of the thousand-year-old Via Emilia.